The Holy-Evil War – Part 05
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Translator: Kell
This is all Lily’s fault.
I was going to abandon the priest, but Lily screamed for me to help, so I did, knocking down Raul’s spear with my sword. I, both objectively and subjectively, looked cool with my entrance.
Raul took a few steps back. The creepy mud puppets that had been hounding the priest also moved away like a receding wave and circled around the princess.
“You’re… really… stupid, you know that?” the priest said.
His breath came in labored gasps, perhaps from his injuries, exhaustion from running, or disgust at my utter stupidity.
I was, in fact, a complete idiot for saving this ingrate and ruining our plan.
“Big brother! Big brother, big brother, big brother!” Lily called repeatedly, her eyes bright.
“What’s the plan now?” the priest asked.
“We’ll figure something out,” I replied.
“How exactly?”
“The witch will handle it.”
It was just like me to move on the spur of the moment. Obviously, I didn’t discuss this with Zero beforehand. But as I cast a glance at the bushes, I saw Zero already done chanting a spell.
Countless plants burst out of the ground, zipping towards Raul and the princess. The horse Beastfallen, completely dumbfounded, was frozen on the spot.
“Raul!” the princess yelled. “What are you doing?! Run!”
Raul finally raised his forelegs. He turned his body around and started running, but there was no way he could escape Zero’s Magic. Vines coiled around Raul’s legs and dragged his huge body down.
“That’s a genius for you. I knew I could count on her!”
Once I jumped out, there was no way Zero would just sit around and do nothing.
Smiling, I dashed onward, sword in hand. I kicked aside the creepy mud puppets rushing to cut the vines and jumped on Raul’s back.
“Whitey!” The princess glared at me.
“Sorry, princess. The plan was to be a little more gentle, but with the priest out of commission, this is our only option.” I cut the vines entangling the princess.
“Princess!” Raul called.
Ignoring him, I tossed the princess towards the Magic circle. She let out a shriek.
“We’re all good, witch! Do it!”
Before I could even give her the signal, Zero already invoked her spell. As the princess fell on her back, the ground around her rose fast, quickly trapping her body in a box of soil.
The box was as big as a room of an inn. The original plan was to trap Raul along with her, so she should have more than enough space.
The mud puppets swarmed the box of earth to save the princess, but a light snap of Zero’s finger, and they all stopped moving. The simple gesture showed just how powerful and experienced a witch she was. I couldn’t help but whistle in admiration.
Zero scowled at me. “We’re all good, witch?” she said. “You charged in without even saying anything to me.”
I lifted my tail and pointed at the priest, who was slumped down on the ground, holding his shoulder.
“Hey, if you wanna lodge a complaint, take it up with him,” I replied. “He’s the one who screwed up.”
Zero raised an eyebrow. “The priest did not blunder.”
The priest raised his head curiously.
“Did you really think that if I asked a member of Dea Ignis to take a witch alive, he would do as told? I assumed he would try to kill the princess, and Horse would do everything in his power to stop him. Above all, Sanare and the princess are not stupid. They should be prepared for a possible attack. The priest would be forced to retreat either way. The chances of surviving was higher if he went with the intent to kill. It all went according to my plan. In fact, I would say drawing them this far is a great achievement.”
The priest’s jaw dropped. “Y-You thought… I couldn’t kill the princess?”
“Allow me to answer your question with a question. Why did you think that you could defeat them alone? Your opponent is a Beastfallen and a pair of gifted witches. Moreover, Sanare, cunning as she is, would have definitely prepared something for her absence. You could not have handled them on your own, even if you were trained to fight a witch and a single horseman. Show me your shoulder.”
Zero healed his injury with Cordia. The wound closed up immediately, and the priest let out a deep sigh that seemed to be a mix of relief and regret.
“What were you gonna do if the priest couldn’t lure them here?” I asked.
“If the priest fell, Rat would move, and then you, and then I would take the appropriate measure. Like I did just now.”
“Wow!” Lily exclaimed. “So resourceful!”
That’s a big word for her. If you asked me, though, I’d call it lacking a plan than being resourceful.
Well, things worked out in the end, so it didn’t matter, really.
“You seem to have something to say, Mercenary.”
“No, no, no, nothing at all. Anyway, what are you gonna do about Raul?” I jerked my chin towards the horse Beastfallen tangled up in vines. “You can’t lock him up with the princess now, can you?”
“How about killing him?” the priest said coldly.
Zero gave him a dismissive look. “Nonsense. We cannot kill the one who did the best among us. We should thank him, in fact.”
I laughed. “True. He should be commended for hurting the priest.”
“That is not what I meant,” she said in the same dismissive tone.
I shut my mouth.
Raul, smart as he was, seemed to have realized that there was no point in struggling. He lay still on the ground, his gentle face tense, watching us with frightened eyes. He was waiting to see what we would do.
“If Sanare comes back and finds out about this situation,” Raul said, “she will kill the princess.”
Zero walked up to Raul. “I put her inside a warding to prevent that from happening,” she replied. “Her mentor, the sorcerer Argentum, entrusted her to me. I will not let Sanare kill her.”
“But—”
“Raul.” For once, Zero actually called someone by their name.
Surprised, I looked at Zero.
She kneeled down on the spot and stroked Raul’s hair as one would do to a child. “You did well to bring the princess here. I will never betray your trust.”
“What?”
Raul brought the princess here?
It was indeed Raul who carried the princess on his back, but Zero made it sound like he knew all about our plan. I shot Zero a questioning look.
The witch smiled and looked at me. “At some point, Horse saw through our plan. And he is the princess’s attendant, not Sanare’s servant. Who should he follow to save the princess, Sanare or us? The answer is obvious. That is why Horse chased the priest too far and hesitated for a moment before retreating from my Caplata. He did all that without arousing suspicions, even when we made a blunder.”
“Really?!”
Raul gave me a tired, vague smile. He didn’t give me a definite answer.
“You had a rat Beastfallen with you back in Latette,” he said. “And I can understand animals too.”
“What?!” Lily exclaimed in surprise. “No way! My friends didn’t tell me anything about that!”
“I was pretending not to understand.”
Lily groaned. She didn’t seem to like Raul, which was perfectly understandable.
“So you’re saying you knew everything?” I asked. “That we were trying to lure the princess here?”
“Not everything. I couldn’t gauge how you all were going to treat the princess. Besides, the priest was going to kill her. I wasn’t sure that you were on our side. So I thought that if you were all enemies, I should at least kill the priest.”
I wouldn’t blame Raul for this, as the priest had it coming. He killed the princess’s master. She then joined Sanare because of her hatred towards the priest and the Church.
“If I managed to kill the priest with my spear earlier, I would have retreated. But once Mercenary came out, I no longer had the chance.”
If he withdrew, the princess would just go back to being Sanare’s subordinate. When Zero used Caplata, he realized that we were trying to take her alive, so he hesitated.
“I didn’t mean to get caught on purpose, but I guess it’s the same thing. It’s true. I was hoping that someone would save the princess from Sanare. She’ll be mad, for sure, but I want to protect her, even if she ends up hating me for it.”
Now this is the kind of loyalty I want a certain wolf Beastfallen to have.
Seeing that Raul was not going to resist, Zero freed him from the wriggling vines. Raul quickly stood up and ran over to the box earth in which the princess was trapped.
“Is there an air hole somewhere? She won’t suffocate, right?” He put his ear to the dirt wall and listened carefully to the princess’s voice.
“There are no air holes,” Zero said. “But fret not. We will get this over with before she suffocates. Now let us begin the final preparations to trap Sanare. If you cooperate, we have a very good chance of success.”
“The only thing I can do is be a guide,” Raul said.
“Your presence is all I require. I will create a substitute for the princess. If you stay by its side, Sanare will assume it is the real princess. Now, let us hurry to the campus. You stay here, priest.”
The priest raised his arms. “With pleasure,” he replied grimly.
His wounds might have healed, but he couldn’t recover the blood he had lost that quick. He would only be a burden at the moment.
“As for you, Rat, keep an eye on the priest so he does not kill the princess. We will simply be getting rid of a pesky pest. It will take a while, but…” Zero pondered over it for a moment. “We should be back by lunch at the latest.”
Her tone was casual, as if she was just going out for a walk.
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